Level Up! Live 2009, the country’s still largest gaming convention was held last November 7 and 8 at the World Trade Center in Pasay City, Philippines. We attended Day 1 of the event, Saturday, and joined the crowd in playing non-PC games – for the first time.
Follow up:
We arrived at the WTC at around 3:00 in the afternoon and registered as a blogger “press”. It is rare to see an event where bloggers are recognized as press or media. (The only thing missing was that they did not give any press materials.)
We were hands-on this time. Why not when the booth games are interesting (and lines are not that long). Me and girlfriend Sherlene visited the GrandChase archery booth; the Rohan Online Nintendo Wii fishing booth; and the CrazyKart arcade racing booth.
Later, we found out why the line was not as long as in the previous years – no goodie bags if you completed your passport stamps. Just when we tried the booth games, there were no goodies to give away. But that’s okay and that’s not the main event of the convention.
It was the announcement of Level Up’s newest Massively Multiplayer Online First-Person Shooter (MMOFPS) game – Sting Online (as is known in Korea) or K.O.S. Secret Operations (as is known elsewhere) by YNK Interactive.
Level Up! also announced a new title to their line-up of Level Up! Global Games or LU/GG, coming this 2010 (a few months away!) is Neo Steam, a free-to-play SteamPunk MMORPG from JoyImpact and HanbitSoft.
Machinima and other user-generated videos were also shown on that day which the audience enjoyed a lot (you can watch it all here). There were also the yearly guild booths (and the Holy Order of the Light™ won the Best RF Online Booth award) and the LU Live Cosplay competition.
Finally, the main event why most Filipino gamers attend gaming conventions – tournaments. This is where representative guilds from each server of each game battle it out on stage and show to the world who’s the best, the strongest, and the most cunning.
Here are the rest of the photos from Day 1.
Oh, we found out later that there were gamers brave enough to stay in line for the early bird promo. The first 500 to register (for the next day) will get prizes (depending on which game they play). One guy we talked to failed to get counted for Day 1 and so he made sure he’s not just in the first 500 but in the first 200 mark for the second day. Now that is really an adik.